YMMV / Potionomics

• Awesome Music:
  • "The Cat Pirates" is a sea shanty melody that uses meowing sounds as an additional "instrument." It's one of the most exciting and upbeat mewsical numbers in the game.
  • Corsac's Journey is a beutiflly soothing piece.
• Broken Base: The below mentioned Surprise Difficulty is by far the most contested aspect of the game. Some players believe that the difficulty is too intense and not fun, especially for a shop management game, while others argue that the difficulty is tough, but fair (especially after numerous patches), and that the threat of actual consequences for failure help make the game stand out from other, more lighthearted shop sims. Some particularly disgruntled players have gone so far as to accuse the game of false advertising, claiming that neither promotional materials or the official demo had any indication of how steep and unforgiving the difficulty curve would be.
  • As of June 2023, the complete lack of any post-launch support or meaningful communication from developer Voracious, especially as more and more players are flooding the forums requesting an Endless mode.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Owl is actually Oswald after he got accidentally transformed. His familiarity with the shop, the way he talks about Oswald before correcting himself and how poorly he dodges questions about his human self means you'll probably be wise to this reveal about 15 minutes into the game.
• LGBT Fanbase: Several factors of the game have attracted LGBT players: Sylvia having several romantic options, some of them also female like her like with Saffron and Luna; the variety of body types and personalities, most prominently Roxanne's being a Big Beautiful Woman or Mint having prominent muscles and emphasis on her athleticism without deriding either's deviation from traditional beauty norms; explicitly non-binary characters such as Quinn; and having some unorthodox choices among the male love interests, like Muktuk who is stout, muscular, and hairy as a result of being a walrus-man, or Baptiste's incredibly flamboyant, Camp mannerisms which have some fans liking to imagine him as bisexual or simply a straight man who's unafraid of acting feminine.
• Surprise Difficulty: Those going into the game expecting a casual, lighthearted shop management sim ala Recettear or the earlier Atelier Series games would do well to think again. The time limits until the next contest (and subsequently the deadline for your next debt payment) are surprisingly strict, meaning that many times, the more social portions of the game such as spending time with Sylvia's friends simply aren't worth it since you need to spend as much time as you can brewing and gathering ingredients if you want to have any hope of clearing the contests. The amount of ingredients you can find, the types you can find, the potions you can craft, and the quality there-of are entirely randomized and luck-based each run, meaning that if you get dealt a particularly bad hand, you simply will not have enough resources to clear the contest, which is a problem since unlike Recettear, failing to make your payments by the deadline is an automatic hard Game Over, and since your save files only go back a certain amount of days, a single mistake (or simple bad luck) can easily render your entire playthrough unwinnable and force you to start a completely new playthrough with none of your upgrades or unlocks carrying over.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • You can pay Muktuk to upgrade your cauldrons, for a modest sum of cash and some crafting ingredients. You cannot, however, upgrade a cauldron while it's in use, making it impractical to upgrade your top-line cauldrons as you'll be constantly brewing potions for sales, hero expeditions and the competition. While you can upgrade the older cauldrons you're not using, the upgrades will rarely give them the ingredient and magimin capacity they'd need to remain competitive, making it impractical compared to simply buying new high-tier cauldrons.
  • The Hangout mechanic lets you spend several blocks of time with an NPC, which decreases your stress level, increases your Relationship Values with them and fleshes out their story through dialogue. With the absolute premium that the game puts on time management, however, the benefits are rarely worth the time. You can much more easily advance your relationships by gifting ingredients (which you can do to every vendor NPC in a single block of time), and control your stress level by ending the day early.

---